How to Read A Few Crusted Characters

Abstract

Among Hardy’s less-remarked accomplishments is his ability to create cryptic or ambiguous titles for some of his works: Far from the Madding Crowd, A Laodicean, A Group of Noble Dames, Jude the Obscure. Despite an oblique relationship to the works they designate, such titles are hardly exact descriptions. Far from the Madding Crowd, while pastoral in setting, is not really about a world removed from ignoble strife but is concerned with the tragic concatenations of love affairs; A Laodicean is only marginally interested in religious attitudes; and Jude’s obscurity is a complex pun on his nature, obscure to himself as well as others, and on his social situation. Similarly, A Few Crusted Characters, which we would expect to be a series of sketches of quaint personalities valued for their well-aged eccentricities, like a fine old crusted port, turns out to be instead of group of short tales, an interlinked ‘frame-story’ principally built around the ironic mischances of love and ranging from pastoral farce to grim psychological tragedy.

Keywords

Critical Approach Minor Work Love Affair Church Tower Direct Marriage

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J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (London: Oxford University Press; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970) pp. 49, 107. All these comments together total about a page, and only Hynes mentions the stories at all, his comments being brief observations on Tony Kytes and Netty Sargent. Comment by other critics is similarly notable for its brevity and its focus on the frame-story.Google Scholar

Ralph W. Rader, ‘Fact, Theory and Literary Explanation’, CI, i (1974) 245–72. The fact that Rader disagrees pointedly with Fish does not invalidate the use of his concept at this point in any essay that bears some resemblance to Fish’s method.Google Scholar